Stokes ably demonstrates the critical importance of affect and sentimentality in their music, and how in turn these play a key role in contests over civility, urbanity, national identity, and globalization.
It's the closest they get to a love song, and all the more affecting for its lack of sentimentality.
In fact, it's a mixture of the two; an effective (and affecting) weepie that marries the unashamed sentimentality of Love Story with the rougher edges of Now Is Good, while largely eschewing the insufferable archness of Gus Van Sant's appalling Restless.
Ailey's 1979 "Memoria," a tribute to Joyce Trisler that is danced to music by Keith Jarrett, manages to be affecting despite its moments of flash and sentimentality, in part because of the performances by teen-agers from the Ailey school.
The result is affecting, satisfying, and way this side of conventional sentimentality.
That story edges toward sentimentality, then veers into something stranger: an affecting meditation on human intimacy.
It's a fine line between sentimentality and documenting the thing, but, for us, we were telling a story and we did want to affect people".
As sensitive and affecting as this mother-daughter drama may be, the film skillfully bypasses its genre's potential pitfalls, opting for intimacy over sensationalism, poignancy over sentimentality.
You want sentiment, not sentimentality.
So much for sentimentality.
It wasn't sentimentality.
